The present invention generally relates to processing received wireless communication signals and particularly relates to using joint channel estimation to cancel interfering signals from a received wireless communication signal.
In response to an ever-increasing demand for wireless services, wireless providers continue searching for new ways to increase the capacity of current wireless networks. Because interference within a system limits capacity, one way to increase system capacity is to reject or cancel interference using digital signal processing techniques. Interference cancellation can be performed by jointly demodulating the desired and interfering signals. One type of joint demodulation requires the received signal to contain synchronized desired and interfering signals. When the desired and interfering signals are synchronized, the training symbol period of the interfering signal roughly overlaps the training symbol period of the desired signal. As a result, the joint demodulation process may exploit the overlapping training sequences present in the received signal to jointly estimate the desired and interfering signal channels.
However, the desired and interfering signals received by the wireless communication device are not always synchronized, e.g., in current Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) cellular radiotelephone systems like Global System for Mobile communications (GSM), Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE), and Digital-Advanced Mobile Phone Service (D-AMPS). As a result, the training sequence of the interfering signals does not overlap the training sequence of the desired signal, which negatively impacts the performance of the synchronized joint channel estimation process discussed above.
To address this problem, the wireless industry continues to explore methods of joint channel estimation that do not require the desired and interfering signals to be synchronized, and therefore, do not require knowledge of the training symbols associated with the interfering signal.